Tonight Larry King will be hosting two celebrity documentarians--Morgan Spurlock (cheers) and Ben Stein (boos). Alas, if the former wanted to be well equipped to debunk the latter's expected tripe about evolution, there probably would have been no better training than making The Republican War on Science as a documentary. But Spurlock opted not to--a decision he recently discussed here in a Q & A. To wit:
Your name has been connected to an adaptation of the book The Republican War on Science? Any news on that project We bought that book a couple years ago. We optioned the rights to that in 2004 right after Supersize Me came out. We've given up the option since then. That would've been a great film to make 3 or 4 years ago but it's not as relevant now. It would hard not to be political when dealing with source material like that. With a subject like that it's not a straight Republican issue. It's a very political issue in how the government views science and what parameters researchers have to work in when trying to get funding from the government. There's a tremendous amount of give and take on both sides of the aisle. There were a lot of things we were going to talk about but we're not going to make it now, so it doesn't really matter.
Not relevant? Doesn't really matter? I'm not so sure, Mr. Spurlock. You did great work with Super-Size Me, and you have lot of great projects to choose from. Still, the fact that you're about to go up against an anti-evolutionist documentarian on Larry King strongly suggests that it's still relevant, and still matters. * Of course, I'm kinda hopelessly self-interested on this one....
